Change

For more than two decades I shared my days with automobiles starting and stopping at poorly syncopated traffic lights, people rushing to work, class, or in and out of restaurants and stores along sometimes crowded sidewalks. The cohort with whom I shared my daytime space included slow moving vagrants, aggressive panhandlers, strolling tourists, and intently focused pedestrians. The ecosystems of the city blocks my previous two churches rested on could be busy places – one on the urbanized edge of a major university campus and the other downtown on a major thoroughfare of an historic city commercial zone.

Now, and for the last three years, my days have been shared mostly with birds darting between the trees and feeders in my back yard, stationary trees that nonetheless move and seem to possess different personalities. It is a busy scene too, every bit as busy as an urban landscape if not more so. But it is quieter, much quieter to human ears.

Night is even more different here than in the city.

Here, there is tremendous activity but the casual observer would never know it. Deer hardly make a sound as they forage in our yard for grass, or sneak apples fallen from the trees. Raccoon, skunk, opossum, fisher, coyote, beaver are all around in the dark but even my dog rarely hears them. I only know they were there with us because of evidence that appears the next day. Very occasionally, the bloodcurdling scream of an animal being caught in the jaws of another awakes us like a shot.

But in the city, at our last address, an angry F-bomb would regularly be dropped below our bedroom window from the violent mouth of some drunken reveler pissed off at his girlfriend or companion. A random gunshot at night in the city evoked a much different concern than the multiple shotgun volleys that wake us during duck season here along the lake. In the city, where we lived anyway, nighttime commotion and noise was not that much less than during the daytime, just different; as nocturnal light is different from sunlight.

I am going back to city life, a smaller city to be sure, but a proudly and intentionally urbanized one. I wonder how it will affect my writing? I am apprehensive. I expect change, most of the time I court it, but not knowing what it will be is unsettling. Sometimes I am curious and philosophical and at other times anxious and sleepless. That is to be expected, just how it is, I tell myself, feel it.

The strand of this quiet beauty I dread letting go of the most is the night sky. As a percentage of my waking hours I get to enjoy it the least, and yet it is the most dramatic, healing, and penetrating moment of the day. Walking the dog into the night, whether balmy or fiercely frigid, is unadulterated joy when the atmosphere is clear and the cosmos scattered above us in its glory. As awesome and exquisite as the vista from Mount Pisgah, it is the grandeur of starscape that lifts my skull and opens the eels of my brain to the outside air.

To the heart that keeps its window open, and to the hospitable mind that does not fear unknown visitors, life keeps giving new and ample gifts. I know this, and look forward with anticipation to the unforeseen. Yet having reconnected with a long ago relationship to the night sky, I am thinking about how to keep in touch with my new old friend.

Like this:

Related

Comments

So happy to have seen you x/c skiing on this “day that the Lord has made!”
I wish for you change that will offer wonderful days and nights and opportunities and know that you will remember the Northeast Kingdom. We will miss you so much!

The night sky will see you no matter the city glare, and we always welcome you back to rural vermont. On the other hand, a life with no F-bombs is not a real life, and whatever new experience small-city life will bring at night will be part of your wholeness.
Blessings and love,
Jane

Somehow it seems easier to listen deeply, discern God in it all, in the rural setting. But surely God wants us to listen deeply in the midst of the cacophony of the city, too! You seem gifted to do that either place. Bravo! And thank you for sharing.

Many thanks for this Katie, and it is so true! Maybe, when we live more in isolation from others, we begin to have difficulty hearing others in the same way that noise makes it difficult to hear ourselves. Maybe?

Hi Cam,
Best wishes on your next step in the journey. Stars and planets still exist in Geneva, the same ones; I saw them here just last night in Seattle along the waterfront. Even the planes circling Seatac added something to it.

Geneva, what a wonderful place, and not too far from Trinity on Delaware and all the F-bombs your heart could desire.
By the way, just read a fine biography of William H. Stewart, of Lincoln times and Stewarts Folley (Alaska). Talk about a time of chaos. We live in a small eddy of confusion in comparison.
Although it doesn’t feel that way.
Lance

Hey Lance, good to hear from you! Yes, Geneva and the Fingers Lakes are lovely, and full of history – Women’s Rights Museum, Auburn home of Stewart, a strange and eclectic history of religion and Utopianism, and beautiful lakes and vineyards. Alas, Seneca lake doesn’t freeze because it’s too deep but they say it is the center of world for lake trout fishing! Thank you for the well-wishes and blessings to you out in that glorious city!